The Web's First Mark Wahlberg API

In what is surely a sign of the next big thing, there's now an API named after Mark Wahlberg, or at least his 1990s rap alter ego. The Marky Markdownifier API can't promise the good vibrations of a dance party from yesteryear, but it sure can convert HTML pages to markdown. And really, in 2012, no bunch is funkier than a developer tool that both consumes and provides an API.

The humorously-titled API comes from Brett Terpstra's own itch, as he explains in his reintroduction post:

It’s a project I started back in 2010 and use regularly, but it’s never really caught on with the Markdown masses. I’ve tweaked the algorithms and added to the API to make Marky as useful as possible within my own workflow, and hopefully within other’s as well.

At its most simple, Marky takes urls and converts them to Markdown text, removing comments and ads in the process. A web-based version of read2text. In the web interface, you can copy Markdown to the clipboard, preview it as HTML and a few other surface level tasks. You can also go straight to HTML view and use Marky as an Instapaper Mobilizer kind of tool. It can be more useful than that, though.

Marky uses the Readability API to discern the content portion of a web page. The HTML is then converted into markdown, a method of writing rich text that is easier to read and write than HTML.

The API is hosted, though "it’s not currently set up to scale to any extreme." Terpstra does make the code available to run your own version of Marky Markdownifier on your own server. So, we're sure to be seeing many more boy band-themed developer tools. New Kids on the Blockquote, anyone?

About the author:Adam DuVander
-- Adam heads developer relations at Orchestrate, a database-as-a-service company. He's spent many years analyzing APIs and developer tools. Previously he worked at SendGrid, edited ProgrammableWeb and wrote for Wired and Webmonkey. Adam is also the author of mapping API cookbook Map Scripting 101.